Beckism.com

Via Daring Fireball:

17-Year-Old Unlocks iPhone

The teen estimates he spent 500 hours developing his technique, sometimes working until 9 am and then waking the next day at 4 pm to resume his work.

Obviously, anything that requires soldering is only going to appeal to a miniscule niche, so this isnâ??t really huge news. But thereâ??s something admirable about a kid willing to put that amount of time into an obsessive project like this. Someone at Apple ought to line him up for an internship next summer.

Or find the kid a good psychologist.

From Wired, one of the biggest technology magazines that I know about. I subscribed to their RSS feed months ago, simply because every once in a blue moon something interesting pops onto the radar. Today I was titillated by this:

Hackers Take Down the Most Wired Country in Europe

My reaction after slogging through all five painful pages: what the fuck? Aside from being rife with typos (my personal favorite: they failed to capitalize the name of their own magazine on page four) and populated by nonexistent pictures, the article reads like a cheap action flick. We’ve got evil communists, bad-ass computer geeks, war propaganda, conspiracy, cyber-terrorism, total paranoia…you name it, it’s there.

Is this journalism? What the hell is wrong with the editors at Wired that they allowed this kind of crap to get published? I’m inclined to wonder if someone hacked Wired’s website and posted the article as some sort of off-color joke.

My god, I wrote satire and lies for four years, and it was better than this junk. I’m honestly tempted to unsubscribe from their RSS feed. If this kind of crap is their version of a “top story”, then I don’t really see a need to waste even the small amount of time it takes to skim their headlines every day.

Quite honestly, if I wanted to read poorly-done war propaganda I’d rather turn to Tod Holton, Super Green Beret than Wired magazine.

God, I love Tod Holton. If only I could unleash some magic monkeys on the Wired editors.

Alright, I’ll admit it; I’m a sucker when it comes to Stickies replacements. I’ve tried GTD programs and so forth, but when it comes to needing to jot down notes and to-do items, I often find myself returning to Sticky Notes (my current favorite, although development on it is pretty sporadic).

A new stickies program was just released called SketchBox, and although I haven’t tried it yet, it looks very cool. Aside from a very appealing interface, the program allows you to do three things: add text to stickies, attach reminders and alarms to stickies, and draw on stickies using a graphics tablet.

Very cool. I can think of all sorts of interesting uses for this program for artists, or anyone who likes to use graphics tablets. Sadly, I am currently tablet-less, but this is definitely a program to check out.

I saw the most amazing license plate the other day. I suppose you have to be into the web to get the joke, but on the back of a car in front of me this is what I saw:

404-UHH

The best part is that it wasn’t a custom plate, so the person inside probably had no idea that I was behind them laughing because their car was throwing me a vehicle not found error and was to top it all off confused and speechless about the whole thing.

The fact that I found this as funny as I did probably indicates that I should spend more time outside and less on the computer, but such is life.

To quickly recap: Bob Keefe asked Steve Jobs why Apple doesn’t put Intel stickers on their computers. The world leaped down his throat, quickly notifying him that he’s a jackass and a moron. Duh, Apple doesn’t use Intel stickers because they are ugly. QED. Idiot.

Except no one bothered to ask Mr. Keefe why he asked the question. Fortunately, he decided to share. He even posted a picture of his head on a jackass. Pretty damn classy, if you ask me. He asked a question that, granted, does seem to have a fairly obvious answer to us egotistical Mac fanatics (even if there are solid reasons why asking a seemingly obvious question can be a good idea), and when the opinionated Mac blogging world jumped down his throat he responded with humor instead anger.

So why are people still shitting on Mr. Keefe? Simple: people prefer to be stupid. Life is much more fun when Mac users are right, Windows users are wrong, and Bob Keefe is a jackass (unless you’re a Windows user or Bob Keefe, of course). Making fun of people is hilarious. It’s easier, too; you never have to think about the fact that the person you’re ridiculing is another human being with a set of reasons for their actions. (And as to why bloggers prefer attack mode to investigating and reporting, it’s because attacking takes little to no time and sells well; people much prefer split-second opinions to hearing that the world is more complicated than their black and white fantasies.)

I don’t think the whole thing is about cultural relativism as M Diced claims (after all, Mr. Keefe is a Mac user). I think it’s because, in general, people prefer to be stupid (and John Gruber, who loves the jackass thing, enjoys falling victim to the fundamental attribution error â?? hell yeah I took psychology).

And then there’s me: I think the people who are making a big deal out of Bob Keefe’s question are being stupid, so I go on the attack and write a blog post about it. The irony does not escape me, but I at least have a consolation prize: I’m pretty sure that I’m right, and those other people are wrong.

Via Daring Fireball:

Send Voicemail to Yourself on an iPhone

Nifty trick for sending voicemail to yourself on an iPhone â?? a poor manâ??s voice memo feature.

Poor men have iPhones?

Lost Dog by Bill Cameron is a very good book. I don’t read much crime fiction, but I hang around a forum where the author has been known to post and when other forum-ites said they really liked I picked up a copy.

It lay around on my bedroom floor for a while, until last night before I went to bed I decided to read a chapter before sleep.

Needless to say, I’m completely sleep deprived today because I was up until 4:00 in the morning reading it. Character-driven, action packed, and with a wonderfully twisted villain, Lost Dog is an amazingly fun read. I highly recommend it. My only quibble was that there weren’t any elves.

I really missed elves.

I created the design that became my new Mac software blog Tagamac by accident. I was in between web design clients, but had just bought a new font (Estilo) and wanted to play around with it. I started messing around in Photoshop and pretty soon I had a mockup image that was quite intriguing. Aside from Estilo, which just oozes personality, I had come up with a border that was a lot different from any of my previous designs: it extended a little over halfway across the from both sides, but didn’t go all the way across. The top and bottom complemented, but didn’t complete each other.

I had to create the HTML just to see if I could. This would not be a difficult design with tables, of course; heck, I could have Photoshop figure out how it wanted to break it up for that. Divs, however, were another matter. After fighting the good fight, I have a method that I think is pretty slick. In fact, the only thing I regret is that I had to use a pixel fixed width; the squishy fixed width that I’m using for the Idol Bat, One Crayon, and this site could play no part (it’s squishy because it’s in ems; if you resize the text, the width of the page will grow to keep the line lengths similar).

I doubt other people will have quite the same fixation with asymmetrical designs, but I figured I’d outline how I achieved the Tagamac design here. If you want to see exactly how it’s done you can of course check out the source.

The problem I ran up against was not getting the middle main area looking good, but making the borders I’d created extend to the edges of the screen. I solved my problem by using two main header divs and two footer divs. Each div is 50% the width of the screen. For the headers, the left header has a background image along the bottom for the border; for the footers, it’s the right footer. Then each of the header divs has a content div. The content divs are each half the width of the whole page (which is 800px), have an ‘auto’ outer margin, and contain images that hide the background in the parent divs.

And voilá: an asymmetrical page! Of course, the header and the footer have to be broken in half (so there can’t be anything that spans them) and the page width is a fixed pixel width, but overall I’m pretty happy with it. Asymmetry is a relatively easy way to make websites that stand out (from my standard designs, if nothing else).